jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Ten years ago, Werner Herzog made a documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly, about a German-born U.S. Navy pilot who was shot down in Laos during the beginning stages of the Vietnam war. Now, Herzog returns with a fictionalized version of the very same story starring Christian Bale. It’s obvious why the director of Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde, and Grizzly Man couldn’t stay away from this material: Dieter Dengler’s jungle ordeal is bursting with themes that have defined Herzog’s career, and it’s one hell of a story.

After his plane is downed during a secret bombing mission on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Dengler (Bale) is taken prisoner by Pathet Lao soldiers. His captors torture and abuse him in fiendishly innovative ways before marching him through the stunning landscape to a detainment camp. The other captives (played by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies) are resigned to their miserable bamboo prison, but Dengler, with German ingenuity, hatches plans for escape. The details of his imprisonment and subsequent flight through the dense Southeast Asian jungle form an encyclopedia of deprivation: hunger, madness, pain, and treacherous flora and fauna all around. And yet, in this version of the quintessential Herzogian battle of man versus nature, man triumphs.

Anybody who has seen Burden of Dreams knows that on extreme location shoots, Herzog doesn’t spare his actors, and stories about Christian Bale’s own ordeal have been making the rounds; scenes involving worms, leeches, and waterfalls appear all too real, with no stunt doubles or CGI in sight. Through it all, Bale’s performance is wonderfully emphatic, always holding on to a stubborn optimism as he turns from fresh-faced fighter pilot to the emaciated, scruffy wreck that emerges from the jungle, his face caked with blood and dirt. In the supporting roles, Steve Zahn takes a welcome break from his recent run of comedies, and Jeremy Davies does a repeat performance of the wigged-out freak from Soderbergh’s Solaris.

Many movies falsely promise what Rescue Dawn delivers: a thrilling, visceral adventure about what marketers and book flap writers like to call “the resilience of the human spirit.” To Herzog’s credit, this most American of his films hits all the marks of the genre splendidly without ever resorting to easy shock tactics or vilification of the so-called enemy. Rescue Dawn is that rarest of beasts, a powerful fiction based on fact that sacrifices neither storytelling nor the truth.

Rescue Dawn. Werner Herzog, 2006. ****

Rescue Dawn opens on July 4. Here’s the trailer:

For once, a life worthy of a memoir. Leni Riefenstahl tells the gripping story of her rise from dancer and star of silent mountain films during the Weimar Republic to Triumph of the Will, Olympia, and “Hitler’s filmmaker,” followed by her long fall after the war, the Nuba, scuba. Riddled with contradictions, dubious statements and suspicious omissions, the book is also a thorny tangle that raises complicated questions about moral responsibility, political culpability, aesthetics, and ambition. Leni’s extreme unreliability (I had the uncanny sense that she started lying around page 5, about a playground incident) adds a layer of uncertainty that makes the book even more intriguing, down to the heartbreaking (or calculated?) last sentence.

After the war, when landmark achievements and intimate meetings with the Nazi elite–Goebbels, Göring, Hitler, Speer–give way to frustration and a string of canceled projects, the book slows down considerably. As Riefenstahl faces increasing hardship, it becomes difficult not to admire her dogged vitality and feel a certain degree of empathy for her. Regardless of your opinion on her life, work, and guilt, this book is bound to muddy some certainties. I’ll have to look at the two new biographies to see how some of her assertions hold up (not well, apparently), and I’m rewatching The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl for yet another take, but I don’t hope to come to terms with the confounding implications of the case Riefenstahl any time soon. Riefenstahl died in 2003, at the age of 101.

Leni Riefenstahl, A Memoir. 1987. ****

Previously on Muckworld:

• The Blue Light
• The White Hell of Pitz Palü
• Triumph of the Will

Leni

• Leni Riefenstahl - Official Site
• Leni Riefenstahl’s Photography at Fahey/Klein Gallery
• Leni Riefenstahl on Wikipedia

The New Biographies

• Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl by Steven Bach
• Leni Riefenstahl: A Life by Jurgen Trimborn
• Sleeping with ‘Hitler’s filmmaker’
• Clive James’ dismissive review in the Sunday Times
• Michikio Kakutani’s review

The diving sequence from Olympia:

I bought this book as a joke, an afterthought, just because I’d already spent twenty minutes in the dusty Prenzlauer Berg used book store where the salespeople were playing Warcraft in the corner. “Kinski’s always good for a laugh,” I figured, and forked over my three Euros. Little did I know that the joke would blossom into a full-fledged obsession. I’d grown up with an idea of Kinski based mainly on the German TV shows I saw during the 80s: Gottschalk, talk shows. Whenever Kinski was on (and he seemed to be on a lot), he could be counted on to rave and rant and make a public spectacle of himself.

We watched Woyzek in high school, and it freaked me out. Since, I’ve seen Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, and countless of the two hundred B pictures, Edgar Wallace and Karl May adaptations he appears in, and Herzog’s mean-spirited My Best Fiend. Still, Kinski’s artistry seemed to consist of Kinski just being Kinski, a megalomaniac who could outcrazy everybody on screen because he was a madman offscreen, too.

No longer. I can’t say that I understand him after reading his outrageous, boundless autobiography, but at least it’s possible now to imagine what the world looked like from inside Kinski’s head. As he puts it, everything about him was too too: he felt too much, loved too intensely, reacted too quickly, fought too viciously; a raging, fucking, screaming beast of a man whose emotions were too close too the surface, whose appetites where too ravenous, who had no sense of proportion. Put him in a TV studio and ask him idiotic questions about his international success or the endless bad movies he appeared in, and he would show his disdain, question the intention of the hosts and refuse to answer. He talks too quickly and he pounces too early, but you can’t deny that he has a point.

Rewatch his films, and you can see it there, right on the surface: every twitch of his soul is written on an unbearably intense face, threatening, seductive, almost too alive. The agony, the joy, the madness–if our senses weren’t so dull compared to his, we would appear mad, too. It’s no surprise that before the backdrop of mid-20th century German mainstream culture, a creature as fearless as Klaus Kinski should seem completely nuts.

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The thing that nobody seems willing to say is that the biographical sketches that emerge from Michael Apted’s ongoing experiment in “longitudinal” documentary filmmaking are actually pretty depressing. The reason for this isn’t that life sucks and we all get it in the end, but it’s the format: even the most generous collaborator (Tony was at the press conference, and lovin’ every minute) will only put so much of his life into the movie. So instead of getting the good stuff, we’re stuck with endless variations of the outlines: summaries of jobs, marriages, divorces, kids, grandkids, rinse, repeat. That’s interesting as far as it goes (the odd ones out, like hobo-turned-politician Neal, are the most compelling), but nobody really shares what’s most fascinating about them. By the time we get a sense of all that they’re not telling us, we’re off to catch up with the next person. As a result, they feel strangely less real than most fictional characters, which are usually realized much more fully. (Bonus thought: seems that “reality” TV has learned to deal with some of these problems, but they do it through fictional means?)

49 Up. Michael Apted, 2005. ***

[tags]3 stars, film, michael apted, documentary, biography, england[/tags]

Fascinating life, dull biography. Patrick McGilligan’s book could have used some editing–there are typos everywhere and in the later years, he bogs down into the repetitive format of contentious pre-production, awful shooting anecdotes, mixed critical recepetion, repeat. Lang was quite a character though–from the early Weimar years to the (probably made-up) meeting with Goebbels to his emigration and Hollywood years. There is some evidence that Fritz shot his first wife, his second wife went over to the Nazis, and his third wife had to take calls from prostitutes after his death at 85: “Haven’t you heard? He’s dead.”

Every hormone-addled boy wants to join a rock band because “the chicks are great.” But those kids don’t know that becoming a director is an even better way to get laid. This biography, by a bunch of Cahiers du cinema writers, drives home that point beautifully, and it names names: Jeanne Moreau, Claude Jade, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, and pretty much every other beautiful woman who ever acted for Truffaut.

If that’s not inspiring, the book traces FT’s growth from street punk and syphilitic deserter to Oscar-winning independent auteur with admirable style. The part about his flame-out with Godard is fascinating, but I have to admit that I had to skim the clinical and terribly depressing description of his last brain-tumor infested months.

The first part of Bob Dylan’s autobiography is pure greatness. Fearless, witty, grandiose, coy, grumpy, hilarous, Bob keeps assembling his own legend but hell, it still feels like he’s mumbling right into your ear. Fantastic anecdotes, great aphorisms, odd insights, quirky character sketches, nutso metaphors, and some shit for which they’d beat you out of writing class with a stick. He’s a mythological character, and this book works hard to sell the idea that he is one of the Great American Heroes, connecting him with everybody he namedrops–Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, Rimbaud, Kerouac, Whitman, F Scott Fitzgerald, and scores of others.